i don’t really use apps on my phone anymore other than for maps. i just my phone primarily as a phone.

History shows us people only learn to do the right thing after things have gone horrible horrible wrong.

we had a worldwide depression and war that uttered in 80 years of peace. we will have another one before things can truly improve. the current generations are all far too removed from the consequences of their actions.

Our species broadly is far more concerned with narratives and stories than reality. This is how our brains work on a very fundamental level.

Yep. Thanks for mentioning this. It’s really the root of it. The existing social structure is reinforcing/escalating our worst psychological biases. The opposite of what many of us think it should be doing. At least for me… going to school was all about deprogramming all the emotional bias bullshit that my parents and home-town idiots I grew up with believed. The internet also helped a lot with that. It was about getting outside of the bubble.

But it seem around 10 years ago this all shifted. and now education and internet is all about reinforcing those biases. I meet so many ‘well-educated’ people that have such provincial/delusional beliefs about the world now… it’s terrifying. And this is folks on my ‘own side’ of leftism/liberalism… I can only imagine it’s equal/worse among the right. A huge uptick in delusional and magical thinking, and people using their education to justify their crazy thoughts… instead of using their education to dismantle/prevent their crazy thoughts.

I’m not so sure good policy is the way to do it… but I do know from political experience that good policy is something EVERYONE hates. Precisely because it doesn’t benefit them exclusively.

it’s not lead poisoning. it’s people going insane because they live in internet/social media bubbles that lead to constant escalation reinforcement. you can see that nonsense here on lemmy in this very thread where people reinforce a false narrative and then escalate it with more rumor and nonsense or cherry-pick facts from history/reality to reinforce the delusional narrative that the other side is ‘evil’ and refuse to acknowledge your own side is also evil.

people would rather die in a flood of their own bullshit live in an inconvenient reality.

Nah, plenty of younger folks think this way.

I have been paying attention for decades now and I’m not really surprised.

I went to an ivy league school… and lots and lots of my cohort were delusional morons who believed their own farts had magical powers. and the admin and professors were happy to tell the they totally were. and I would say their farts stunk and they would just become angry and harass the shit out of me.

both.

being crazy is not a political affiliation. there are crazy people on both sides doing crazy shit to ‘own’ the other side.

in 2009 I knew a radfem in grad school who would go around screaming at everyone to stop raping people. she was a very damaged person who projecting her abusive past onto everyone around her. and going to grad school writing papers about using artificial wombs to end women’s oppression by men. she also was married to a guy who was a drug user and physically abusive to her…

she went on to work in a hospital admin board…

It’s a legit thing though. I live in Boston. There are people here you meet occasionally who literally… talk about nothing about how awful Trump is and are totally obsessed with him to the point of alienating everyone around them. Who agonize over every tweet he makes everyday as if it is the end of the world.

It’s sort of like how Howard Stern used to get better ratings from people who hated him more than those that loved him. Some folks entire identity is now hating Trump. And half of what they hate is just bullshit, lies and imagination running wild and has little to do with reality.

Too many folks are totally detached from reality really. Living in social media bubbles convincing themselves of their persecution from imaginary enemies. A constant stream of nonsense that is breaking their brains and they bring it IRL and refuse to social with you if you don’t reinforce their preexisting beliefs.

There is a growing contingent of folks who think the world should conform to the reality in their head. Not that they should confirm to the reality outside of it. It’s scary AF. And these folks often think violence is totally justified to make other people conform to the nonsense in their heads.

People are so wrapped up in their political ideas and identities they are literally cutting off their noses and doing other deranged things all to ‘own’ the other side.

And they use this to justify violence against others and themselves.

Why should people be able to fly for cheap?

Air travel is the single biggest contributor to CO2 pollution that the average person produces. Environmentally speaking, air travel should more expensive.

And we have overtourism running rampant now precisely because air travel is now so cheap, destroying many local economies in tourism hot spots.